Most American and European gamers know Sunsoft as the creators of NES titles like Blaster Master and Gimmick!, and stellar licensed games like Batman and Gremlins 2. But the company has a life before this in Japan, with a number of unique titles that never left the country. The 2024 release Sunsoft in Back! Retro Game Selection includes three of these games, newly localized into English and officially released for the international market.
This action-RPG embraces the fascination with pretty girl bikini warriors, a trend popularized with the 1985 anime OVA Leda: The Fantastic Adventure of Yohko, and continued with various other video games like Athena and Valis. In each stage, you must explore to find items that increase your powers, along with an assortment of magic spells. Like a lot of early RPGs, the balance is pretty rough, and you can find yourself getting killed very quickly and easily.
Ripple Island is an adventure game, taking place on an island where humans coexist with talking animals. You take on the role of a boy named Kyle, tasked with defeating an evil emperor. You interact with the world through a series of icons, exploring the land and solving puzzles, though much of it requires trial and error because there’s not often any real guidance. There are four different endings, depending on your accomplishments through the game.
Firework Thrower Kantaro’s 53 Stations of the Tokaido
This side-scrolling action game puts you in the role of a simple fireworks salesman, tasked with making his way across feudal Japan while defending himself from an assortment of bad guys. You attack by throwing fireworks, which are either lobbed at an arc or placed on the ground. The levels are short, but there are 21 of them, each based on real life locations of the Tokaido, the road that connects ancient Kyoto to Edo (now Tokyo).
The emulation quality is solid, with save states and rewind functions. Visual options include a CRT filter (which also rounds the edges of the image), along with a few color palettes, including ones based on the Game Boy and Virtual Boy, for some reason.
As far as translations, The Wing of Madoola was already almost entirely in English, so there is little changed, except for one small bit. When it was originally released, there was a contest to find a secret room, which gave a secret code. In the English version, this was changed to a reference to the infamous Atlantis no Nazo, which reads “Black Hole – Game Over!”, before then switching to another screen reading “Just kidding!” before allowing you to proceed. Firework Thrower Kantaro has some brief messages between levels as the hero swears to meet his sweetheart. None of these are essential to understanding the game but it adds some character to the unusual hero. But since Ripple Island is an adventure game, it’s fully text based, so the new translation makes it playable to English speakers (though it was previously fan-translated).
Each game includes 3D modeled cartridges you can examine, plus supplemental artwork and full manual scans. Unfortunately, these were left entirely untranslated – on PlayStation platforms, reading the manuals triggers a trophy that says “It’s time to learn Japanese!”, which is a little funny. But also, they really should’ve been translated, especially in the case of The Wing of Madoola, which not only gives some backstory but also makes it clearer how to play the game. Any kind of guidance for Ripple Island would’ve been welcome considering the type of game it is.
It’s important to note that these games were released between 1986 and 1988, at a time when game developers were still figuring out best practices for basic things like character physics and gameplay balance. Both The Wing of Madoola and Firework Thrower Kantaro are both extremely rough in these regards, where making it even past the first few stages is an accomplishment. And while Ripple Island has some particular charms, it’s also closer in design to early 1980s text adventures than some of the later, more complex adventures that appeared on the NES like Shadowgate. The collection is also missing some infamous Famicom games like Atlantis no Nazo and Ikki, though perhaps Sunsoft has other plans for these.
Even though these games can hardly be considered classics, it’s still commendable that Sunsoft has been preserving its back catalogue and making it available internationally, giving the English speaking audience a glimpse into a brief era they were never able to experience.
